All items listed and reviewed are available for purchase directly from Brickbat Books, although quantities are limited. Brickbat Books is located at 709 South Fourth Street, in the heart of Fabric Row, in Philadelphia.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Featured: Two from Siglio

Joe Brainard, The Nancy Book

Hardcover

From 1963 to 1978 Joe Brainard created more than one hundred works of
art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent
her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified and
complicated by the incongruity of her presence.

The Nancy Book is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts,
drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of over
fifty works, several of which have never been exhibited or published
before.

In The Nancy Book, Joe Brainard's Nancy traverses high art and
low, the poetic and pornographic, the surreal and the absurd. Whether
inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures,
or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da
Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, and Willem de Kooning, Brainard's Nancy
revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality.

These works exude a beguiling balance of mischief and innocence,
irreverence and wonder, spontaneity and calculation. Together they
accumulate into a sophisticated and complex work of great wit and joy,
rich with metaphor, and equal parts surprise and subtlety.

The Nancy Book also includes original essays by Ann Lauterbach
and Ron Padgett as well as collaborations with luminary poets Bill
Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Frank Lima, Frank O'Hara, Ron
Padgett and James Schuyler.

It Is Almost That

Hardcover

It Is Almost That collects twenty-six visionary image+text
works by women artists and writers. Supremely imaginative in their use
of word and image, these hybrid works are steeped in narrative play and
subversion, inviting readers to engage in multiple modes of reading. The
first in a series that embodies Siglio’s unique editorial mission, It Is Almost That
features substantial excerpts or the works in their entirety—many
previously unpublished, difficult to find, or long out-of-print—by
renown, little known, forgotten, and emerging artists.

The works include a painted autobiographical novel by a young artist who
died in the Holocaust (Charlotte Salomon); the transformation of the
front pages of newspapers into alchemical drawings (Suzanne Treister); a
computer-generated chance operation that “imagines” houses and their
inhabitants (Alison Knowles); the pseudo-scientific examination of
mother-daughter conversations (Eleanor Antin); and drawings called “body
maps,” inscribed with stories of HIV-positive South African women
(Bambanani Women’s Group), among almost two dozen others.

Edited by Lisa Pearson, this collection is not organized like a
traditional anthology; rather, it creates a constellation of works that
exceed categorical boundaries. While many works may be recognized by
their various connections (such as to Fluxus, Conceptual, Feminist, and
Outsider art as well as to experimental literature, etc.), the
collection aims to engage both literary and art audiences, reorienting
the reader so that these works may be seen and read anew.